


old things, half forgotten

by grendelsmom



Series: February Prompts 2021 [1]
Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Gen, bobby and the detective used to date, both ava and bobby are only mentioned, day 1 - love letters, this turned into more of a character study than anything else, written for a list of february prompts that I decided to start today
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:01:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29204772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grendelsmom/pseuds/grendelsmom
Summary: Janosch comes home. Waiting for him is a box full of memories and a very judgemental cat.
Relationships: Detective/Ava du Mortain, Male Detective/Ava du Mortain
Series: February Prompts 2021 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144232
Kudos: 2





	old things, half forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a February Prompt list: Day 1 - love letters
> 
> This is more something I used to explore the character of my detective Janosch, then anything else, but reviews are still very much appreciated. I've been very much into the wayhaven chronicles recently and if I really do manage to pull through with the prompts, this will hopefully not be the last time I've written for this fandom.
> 
> Also: I wrote this in one sitting and nobody, but my tired brain and google docs spelled checked this, so, yeah, there's that.
> 
> Let me know what you thought! :)

Janosch closes the door behind him and kicks his shoes off. His bag lands somewhere on the floor between the front door and the coat rack, quickly followed by his jacket. Schrödinger eyes him in his wise, judgemental way from the open kitchen door.

“What?”, Janosch asks, more harshly than intended, but Schrödinger just meows and walks off - probably to stare out of the window and plot revenge. Janosch sighs. Shit, he thinks, shit shit shit. He moves to the living room and crumbles down on the couch.

The wall next to him seems so much higher than usual, with his head hanging off from the couch, it’s a light, soft orange that he picked out with Tina back when he first started at the station and had moved into a new apartment - his home, now. He remembers how they had painted the walls together - in old t-shirts and even older jeans -, Tina had made little hats out of newspaper for them both and ABBA’s Dancing Queen had been blasting in the background. Life had been so much easier then. He hadn’t been detective and the biggest problems in his life had been a non-existing mother and an ex-boyfriend, that he desperately needed to get over, not… not whatever the fuck is going on now.

Janosch smacks his hands over his eyes and lets out a deep, deep sigh. Maybe if he just tries not to think about it- but it’s no use. And he knows that it’s no use. He is too old to try to repress his emotions until his problems go away. Not that that ever worked for him. Problems tend to stay, he finds, stay and fester and get all nasty and disgusting if nobody deals with them. So, he has to deal with them.

He sits up, slowly rubbing his forehead. The question is how. How does he deal with his problem- his… crush. Is it a crush? He’s not sure. It’s attraction, that much is certain. He finds no shame in admitting that. Ava is an attractive woman, nothing wrong with noticing that. And he enjoys flirting with her. Enjoys that he can make her blush sometimes, but enjoys it even more when she doesn’t blush, but her lips lift into what is almost a smile and her eyes twinkle with what is almost playfulness and she almost flirts back. (She enjoys it too, he thinks, hopes.)

And, yes, he does care for her and the thought of her being hurt - hurt trying to protect him - makes his chest feel too tight and the air too thin. So, yeah, it’s probably more than attraction, probably also more than a crush, but that’s a scary thought and he’s not quite there… yet.

His gaze falls to one of the cardboard boxes that’s been pulled from the shelf and now sits in front of it. He planned on looking through that one today after work. Part of his supposedly annual cleaning regiment. Getting rid of old stuff, making room for new one. But that was yesterday evening, before Ava and he… well, before she had almost touched his cheek and he had almost kissed her and almost thought that she might want him as much as he does. (That much, huh?) Now it seems almost pointless. Why make room for the new, if the new doesn’t want to be here? But he grabs the box anyway and starts sorting through it.

It’s mostly pictures, still in their respective envelopes from then he got them printed, and he decides to keep them immediately. There’s a jar of sand that Tina had gifted him as a reminder from a holiday long, long, long ago and he looks at it for a moment. It’s just sand, he thinks. He can get into his car and drive to the beach if he regrets throwing it away too much. It lands on the steadily growing ‘keep’ pile.

Next is a little cotton bag that’s starting to fray at the edges. He turns it over and a collection of different shells falls into his lap. Some of them are broken, splintered into tiny, tiny pieces, that dust his jeans now. With a little patience he could probably glue them back together. He sighs. He is so bad at this. How is this supposed to work when he can’t even fight the urge to glue some old shells back together only to put them back into an old bag, which he’ll put into an old cardboard box never to be seen again?

He grabs a magazine - he can make out a headline about the right treatment of balcony plants in winter - from the coffee table and bushes the broken shells on it. That much he can throw away. That much at least.

He turns back towards the box, grabbing something from the bottom of it and pulling it out. It’s a small stack of notes. Shit, that’s something he hasn’t seen in a while. They are colourful pieces of square paper, the kind you keep on your desk to take notes, and he can see his own forcefully careless scrawl on it. The ink has slightly faded with the years, but not so much that he couldn’t read them anymore. “take care” reads the first one , “leftovers are in the fridge” the next one with a little star doodled in the corner, “i love you” the third.

He looks at the last one for a while. It’s a soft baby blue and the edge crumples between his fingers. It’s been years, he thinks, years. He used to leave them around the flat, when he lived together with Bobby, for him to find. He’d write them and imagine how Bobby would find them and feel loved or touched, at least. But the notes always stayed where he’d left them. At first he thought that maybe Bobby just forgot, but it was always Janosch who’d collect them at the end of the day and eventually he stopped.

He’s glad now that Bobby didn’t pick them up. He wouldn’t want him to have these now.

There’s an annoyed meow to his left. Schrödinger has returned from his plotting and is now looking at him with questioning, pale yellow eyes. “These are quite old, buddy. Older than you, I think.”, Janosch says, still holding the blue note. His cat meows again and he nods. “Yeah, I know. I’m just bad at getting rid of stuff.” He sighs. “But you’re right. It’s high time for these to leave.”

He collects the rest of the notes and moves to the kitchen - Schrödinger following and pressing against his legs, probably trying his damn hardest to make Janosch trip. He makes it in one piece though. He looks at the notes and suddenly he’s a college student again and in love and maybe-, he thinks but cuts himself off before the stink in his chest gets any worse and throws them in the bin. It’s better that way. It would have been better like this for quite a while.

Schrödinger meows up his leg. “Oh, now you are in bad need of attention? Stupid cat.”, he mutters, but picks him up and presses a kiss between Schrödinger’s ears. “I love you.” Schrödinger purrs - a little.

Janosch carries him back to the living room, ignoring the mess of envelopes and sand jars and broken shells he left behind (Because isn’t that what happens when you clean? You just make the mess worse?), and sits down on the couch. The cat, a warm, comforting weight on his lap. “You know”, he ruffles Schrödinger’s grey fur, who purrs in response, “I think she’d like them. The notes, I mean.” Schrödinger stops purring and opens his yellow eyes to judge him. Janosch laughs and then sighs. “Yeah, I have it bad.”


End file.
